“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!” – Samuel Adams

freedom

Bill Whittle provides excellent analysis of some key differences between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement, including: The Tea Party talks about fiscal responsibility, the Federalist Papers, and the Constitution, the OWS movement…doesn’t do much talking or thinking, but a lot of chanting; While liberals want conservatives to shut up, conservatives want liberals to keep talking; and more.

Proposed federal legislation purporting to protect online intellectual property would also impose sweeping new government mandates on internet service providers — a positively Orwellian power grab that would permit the U.S. Justice Department to shut down any internet site it doesn’t like (and cut off its sources of income) on nothing more than a whim.

Americans have seen their freedoms decline on almost every front over the past decade. We have been spied on by surveillance cameras, eavesdropped on by government agents, had our belongings searched, our phones tapped, our mail opened, our email monitored, our opinions questioned, our purchases scrutinized. One of the few things that has kept us teetering on the edge of a full slide into tyranny is the internet, the primary source of news and information for many people. Little wonder, then, that federal and state governments continue to try to gain control of the world wide web.

We stand at a critical crossroads today in clarifying the role of government in our free country. President Obama was correct to say in Osawatomie, Kansas recently that “this is the defining issue of our time.” Ours is no longer, in our president’s take on things, the land of the free and the home of the brave. America now is the land of the envious and the home of the victim.

A bill sponsored by Rep. Kristi Noem (R-SD) to prohibit any further regulation of rural dust by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) passed the U.S. House today with bipartisan support. The bipartisan bill, H.R. 1633, was approved by a vote of 268 to 150. “The EPA is still saying they have no plans to further regulate farm dust, and that this issue is a “myth,” but those words are empty promises until we back them up with real action.

I think we can all agree that parents who willfullly do harm to their children should no longer be trusted with the welfare of those children. But what if it’s the state that means to do children harm? What are we to do then? Unfortunately, in a culture where government has little if any constitutional restraint anymore, where that government is filled with radicals who are hostile to families and parental rights, this is becoming more of the norm than the exception.

Some jobs are dustier than others. Rural American jobs like tilling fields, herding cattle, driving along dirt roads or extracting important resources from the land are critical American jobs that sometimes kick up a little more dust than others. But as far as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is concerned, the dust is too much.

If you thought 2012 would bring change to government, think of it more as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The two leading candidates at the moment on the right are not champions of limited government. Sadly, it appears that those who consistently support limited government rarely seek high office.

The EPA’s most recent announcement is all vehicles must meet an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025—a doubling of today’s average of about 27 mpg, according to the Wall Street Journal. The free enterprise system is once again interrupted by the edict of a rogue government agency, and the result will be higher costs to the consumer–whether the consumer wants them or not–and a reduction in vehicle safety in order meet these unrealistic standards.

South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley releases further details on the U.S. Supreme Court’s oral argument in the Federal Health Care Reform Act case. The Court has allotted five-and-a-half hours for oral arguments expected to be heard by this February or March, with a decision potentially by late June 2012.

Socialists on the Left would have us believe that their “progressive” (an Orwellian term designed to obfuscate the fact that they are liberal–modern liberal, not classic liberal) ideas can work in the real world. However, it only takes a cursory examination in the real world to realize these fantasies won’t withstand contact with reality. This video provides some insight into how and why these principles contrast, as well as how they work…or, in the case of liberalism, don’t work.

Not only do we have to eat our peas, but we might have to eat our broccoli as well. The Obama Administration reached a tyrannical high recently when, during oral arguments before the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on the constitutionality of Obamacare’s health-insurance mandate, their lawyer, Beth Brinkmann, made the claim that a law requiring Americans to eat broccoli could be constitutional.

At this point in time, anyone who does not understand that America has been taken over by a lawless, communist regime is woefully out of touch with the glaring reality of our situation. How anyone could not see the devilish behavior of Barack Obama and his Marxist buddies in Congress and his administration is hard to fathom, except when we consider that there really are extremely stupid and deluded people in the world. In 2012, vote as if your country is at stake–because it is.

According to a recent report comparing attitudes in Europe and America, only 49 percent of Americans now feel that American culture is superior to others. This is down from 60 percent in 2002. What the study does not examine is what we mean by culture. Culture is about the prevailing core attitudes of a society. And, when we look further into this same study, we find that American attitudes are distinctly different from their European counterparts and that these attitudes very much reflect what is uniquely American.

Many people—unfortunately—associate the term “liberalism” with the ideology commonly held by people who associate themselves with Barack Obama, progressivism, Occupy Wall Street, and the Democratic National Committee. But are supporters of the above causes, politicians, and parties really “liberals?”

Remember ClimateGate a couple of years ago? It was the scandal when a bunch of emails, computer code and documents from the “scientific” community were released to the public, and we obtained our first real proof that the scientific community was deliberately trying to pull the wool over our eyes about the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming. Well, another set of emails has been made public, and they serve to further annihilate what credibility the “scientific” community had left when it decided to sacrifice integrity on the altar of a political agenda.

This is a lengthy but very interesting TV investigative report on how Islamists in the UK are taking over the culture and government there. It was prepared by Dispatches on Britain’s Channel 4. We see how Muslim activists in England are taking over local governments, and are ultimately working to establish Shariah law and an Islamic state in England. Could America be next?

You hear this one sometimes from socialists: the job of the judiciary is to protect the minority from the majority. No it isn’t. Lawbreakers are in the minority; is it the job of the judiciary to protect the minority of lawbreakers from the majority of law-abiding citizens? No, it is the job of the judiciary to uphold the law–which, in this case, involves protecting the majority from the lawbreaking of the minority.

In the ongoing examination of judicial myths Rick Green of Wallbuilders Live, Rick looks at the myth that only judges are capable of interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Have you ever heard a liberal say about a controversial (and probably unconstitutional) piece of legislation: “Well, when the Supreme Court rules on it, then we’ll know if it’s constitutional or not.” Bull!

In a previous article I pointed out that the American people have, to the detriment of our freedom, bought into the lie that the judiciary is a “co-equal branch” of our government, when the founder’s statements and the Constitution itself make it clear that it was to be the weakest of the three branches. Another is that judges have a lifetime appointment, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. But we can do something about it. We can insist that judges who trample our freedom and show contempt for the U.S. Constitution be impeached and removed from office. It’s time we exercised that option.

It’s no secret that the courts have been running roughshod over our freedoms for decades. They’ve been encouraged to do so. And through our ignorance, we the people have allowed the courts to trample our liberties. We have allowed the Supreme Court to become a virtual oligarchy that forces its 9-pronged will on the executive branch, the legislative branch, and on the American people. Isn’t it time we learned the truth, dispelled the myths, and took our freedom back?

My original attraction to libertarian ideals started in political theory and theology rather than in politics. This is not surprising because I did both part of my undergraduate work and three years of my postgraduate work in philosophy and biblical studies. Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence contains a very clear example of the mixture of Libertarian ideals with religious philosophy.

As ObamaCare heads toward the Supreme Court, is it not sad that most basic violations of individual liberty are not intuitively obvious to so many citizens and members of Congress? It’s obvious what’s wrong today. We’ve either forgotten what being American means, or we no longer care.

You really have to love these Marxist occupationists. To heck with the U.S. Constitution. To heck with property rights. To heck with the Ten Commandments (“You shall not steal”). To heck with any sort of morality. To heck with any sort of freedom. Just have the government seize all housing and “redistribute” it.

Homosexual activists in Iowa who want to force a Christian businesswoman to affirm their counterfeiting of marriage. Two lesbians want to call their union “marriage” and insist that a Christian baker make a wedding cake for them. This is another clear illustration that the homosexual agenda is not about tolerance, but about forcing people and society in general to affirm their unhealthy and immoral sexual behaviors.